


Cathedral

by anomieow



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Asexuality, CW: Infant death, Character Study, M/M, One-Sided Attraction, Psychic Abilities
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:13:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26036935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomieow/pseuds/anomieow
Summary: But for a moment the brain’s full complexity is unfurled before him—like Bernini’s St. Theresa, this vision of the brain’s thousand manifestations, transfigurations, iterations pours down around him like shafts of gold: a cathedral, a pudding, a geode hatched open. A chorale of light, of impulse, of blueprints and ecstasies. The holy symmetry of the lobes, their earthen ugliness; by the will of the great animator a thousand cathedrals erected and puddings confected—metaphor is inconsequential in the blinding light of this revelation. Metaphor is language: this transcends.But it only lasts a moment. He is used to it by now, these—what else can he call them but visions? It is like his mind’s eye is momentarily deluged with a sight not his own, and his intellect (which he recognizes with conditioned humility is not insubstantial) is left to sort it out. When he was a child he tried to share it with others, he discovered that he not only lacked the language but that others did not experience the same.A capital imagination,his mother had beamed to a friend once.Unnatural,the woman had retorted darkly. He was eight then and never spoke of it again.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11





	Cathedral

Private Heather’s exposed brain glistens oxblood and rose in the dim light. 

“It’s a pudding, basically,” explains Stanley. 

“I would have said ‘cathedral’,” McDonald retorts mildly. “I suppose it depends on the man.” He glances at Stanley, that ineradicable teasing glint in his eye. 

_And how much he has endured,_ Stanley thinks to himself. After all, there had been a time that he, too, might have likened man’s brain to a cathedral. Actually, he would have reserved that particular metaphor for the body, for it was more apt: the ribcage curved over heart and lung like the kerfed ribs of St. Paul’s vaulting up over the nave. A lavish miracle of engineering, man and cathedral alike; the one’s form echoing the other. The brain, he might’ve likened more to a clock. No less intricate, far less ostentatious of a metaphor. Or a lightning storm. A nebula of tree roots. Not a pudding, at any rate—but now, that’s what he sees, and that’s how he calls it. 

Anyway, he grudgingly likes McDonald. He comports himself with a cheery equanimity more befitting a cook or a seaman than a doctor, and Stanley’s own effort to model a mien more befitting go largely disregarded by both him and Goodsir (who is such a soft, scuttling thing he hardly warrants notice). But McDonald: there’s something of steel in the man, a kind of grit; perhaps the ability to face up to the horror of the brain exposed and scry in it a holiness—and to speak of it with gladness. There was a time they might have been fast friends. 

He casts a sidewise glance at Goodsir, who is busy with flame and sealing wax. He’d asked to stay and watch McDonald cauterize the edges, asserted his will in that cringing way of his: how timid he is, yet he seems always in the way, somehow. His mere presence grates. Now, the eyes having been sealed—at Stanley’s request, Goodsir notes—and the cauters heated, Goodsir takes a moment to inspect the brain closely. It is the first living brain he’s seen, the skull shorn away with unnervingly surgical precision, and it is enough in itself. What he means is, man’s engine needs no metaphor to claim divinity: it is out of this labyrinth of pink hillocks and blood vessels as finely-forked and intricate as lightning that the whole of human history is sprung. Yet removed from the context of its vast scope of accomplishment, one might think of it as so much meat. Both men are correct, but neither grasps the full complexity of it.

Nor does Goodsir, in terms he could explain. But for a moment its full complexity is unfurled before him—like Bernini’s St. Theresa, this vision of the brain’s thousand manifestations, transfigurations, iterations pours down around him like shafts of gold: a cathedral, a pudding, a geode hatched open. A chorale of light, of impulse, of blueprints and ecstasies. The holy symmetry of the lobes, their earthen ugliness; by the will of the great animator a thousand cathedrals erected and puddings confected—metaphor is inconsequential in the blinding light of this revelation. Metaphor is language: this transcends. 

But it only lasts a moment. He is used to it by now, these—what else can he call them but visions? It is like his mind’s eye is momentarily deluged with a sight not his own, and his intellect (which he recognizes with conditioned humility is not insubstantial) is left to sort it out. When he was a child he tried to share it with others, he discovered that he not only lacked the language but that others did not experience the same. _A capital imagination,_ his mother had beamed to a friend once. _Unnatural,_ the woman had retorted darkly. He was eight then and never spoke of it again. Not even when it took the form of instructive presentiment. At ten, idly plucking blackberries on a country ramble, he fancied he could taste—for all of him was given to these visions, brain and ear, touch and tongue—within each black-shining drupelet smaller ones, an infinitude of — what might he call them? The matter of all things parsed into smaller, invisible things. And the next week he learned of cells, discovering their name only after tasting them.

He raises his eyes and glances from Dr. Stanley to Dr. McDonald to Stanley again. And again he sees the darkness around Stanley’s head, a scrambled etch-work of black lines, like a child’s drawing of cloud. He drops his gaze. This he is accustomed to as well: a crown donned by the miserable. A few other men aboard wear it—Captain Crozier, for one; Lt. Irving for another. One learns to disregard it. 

The room warms incrementally as Stanley leaves it. McDonald crosses behind him in the small space, grazing his hand along the small of Goodsir’s back as he does so. This he does often, and it is such a natural gesture for a man of such bonhomie that Goodsir has only recently begun sensing something more in so many seemingly incidental touches: a brush of fingertips as they exchange an instrument, the older man’s gaze lingering—kindly, but lingering nevertheless—a few seconds longer than necessary. 

Perhaps he is imagining it. He hopes he is. Not just because he dreads disappointing McDonald with his eventual rebuff, but because he senses—again, it is nothing he can explain, nor does he see it the way he sees the naked brain before him, the low wooden beams of the sick bay, the anatomical drawings pinned to the wall—a weak, fluttering light, like the beat of moth wings, emanating from Stanley’s heart when McDonald is near. In close proximity, it flickers nearly steadily; it gutters and fades as McDonald moves away. Goodsir knows what it is, though he’s never experienced it firsthand: longing, affection. When shared between two lovers, it buoys him—an aimless sunniness, like one felt as a boy the morning of one’s birthday. But suppressed, as with Stanley’s feeling for McDonald (not even, Goodsir guesses, acknowledged by the sour-tempered veteran to himself) it is an agitation; one’s hands shake and all things, even breath, taste of ash and iron. 

———

Stanley sits up in the dark, willing his breath to quiet. He can almost still feel her scant weight in his palms. A skeletal pink thing she was, grotesquely proportioned. All skull and looming eye, like an unfeathered chick. In the dream he bears her before him like an offering, walking down a sun-blown lane of cypresses, birds darting back and forth overhead. She’d come too early, and with her characteristic stoniness Mary had declared it useless to name her. But in his heart he called her Mercy. In the dream he knows without seeing—in that way that dreams manufacture context with no care whatsoever for waking reality—her face, luminous eyes and a prim mouth belying an adamant will. Not here but somewhere else she grows to be willowy and tart-tongued; she marries and bears children of her own. Not in this life but in another will she make him proud and glad. In this life, he wakes tasting ash and iron, his palms open as in supplication to a weight too phantom to quantify. 

Goodsir, too, wakes. He does not sit bolt upright in bed but rather lies bleary-eyed, assembling the disparate elements of the dream. Not being _his_ dream, per se, he is detached enough to hold it before his mind’s eye like an anatomical model, turn it this way and that. He does not know whose dream it is. He does know, however, that the dream lives of most of his fellows are dreadfully tedious, and so he’s grateful for this startling departure. Generally, men’s dreams are panting, damp, carnal messes: curves of flesh, gliding hands, blurts of soaked heat. He wakes embarrassed, his own body inert but exhausted. Or he’s seen the million fears any man can have transcribed into just a handful of symbols: the dream of the teeth falling out. The dream where you can neither scream nor run nor speak nor hear; you may as well be a girl’s doll. The childhood home distorted: these, at least, interest him vaguely, for it is a bit like travel. His own dreams? He doesn’t dream them. He sometimes wonders if someone else, someone like himself, does.

But in this dream he is standing at the end of an avenue of cypresses. At his feet, a neat dirt path, impeccably clean edged. A warm day but the breeze bears a chill and the smell of blood, and at the far horizon clouds curdle into smoke. Someone far away, arms held out before them, bearing something small in their cupped hands. The figure shimmers and twitches and he can make out nothing about it: male, female, what. He only knows that the clouds have turned to smoke, conflagration not far behind. It keeps coming and coming, never drawing closer—then it is there before him—first a shuddering dark slit in the horizon and then standing as close to him as only lovers stand. His face is a mass of scarlet and char, but he knows him, he knows him like he’d know his own face in a mirror, but now, upon waking cannot recall who it was.

Peculiar, that he should remember the rest so clearly, but not that crucial detail. Equally peculiar, he realizes, is that he is uncertain of the time; doesn’t know how long he’s slept. Now he’s wired awake in that way his body has of feeling tense and angry if he lies about, so up he gets, dresses in the weak light, and steps out into the dark. Most but the watch are sleeping: late, then, rather than early. He climbs stealthily onto the deck, startling Mr. Hickey, who by his crumpled posture and crabbish, ruddy expression—what Goodsir can see of it between his cap and his scarf, mostly those glittering inscrutable eyes and that outsized nose—was probably woken.

“Warn a man,” he grumbles.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hickey, I didn’t mean to disturb you,” he says tartly, hunching his shoulders as he passes him.

“What are you doing up, eh? I’d give my left stone to be abed—“

“I thought you were,” Goodsir says, a bit unkindly perhaps—for he’s never done anything _wrong_ that Goodsir’s aware of, but how he slouches about, the hungry way he is always listening, like a dog watching for a morsel from his master’s table. His proportions all out of sync: that round mouth big nose, all that muscle on a dwarfish little frame. Goodsir chastises himself: _he’s an inch on you,_ he reminds himself. _And the ladies probably fancy him a yard more for it._ Not that Goodsir cares for ladies. He’s simply rather put out that they don’t seem to care for him.

“You’re a funny kind of man,” Hickey tells him. 

“I beg your pardon?” 

Hickey grins. “You know things.” 

“Oh? And what kinds of things do I know?” He turns too quickly and looks Hickey too hard into the eye, sure the witchy vagaries of his brain are writ plain as ABC across his brow. ( _not that he can read,_ says Goodsir’s bitter half.) 

But then Hickey cocks his head. “As the ship’s doctor, I mean. You must learn a great deal.” 

“I’m not the ship’s doctor. Dr. Stanley is. I merely... assist,” he finishes lamely. The ladies must love that knowing grin of his. 

At that moment, there’s a creak as Lt. Irving climbs onto deck. His eyes are hard. “Is Mr. Hickey ill, Mr. Goodsir?” 

Hickey beams at him. “I’m right as rain, lieutenant. The doctor was having trouble sleeping, I expect, and thought a turn in the brisk air might do him good. Isn’t that so?” 

Goodsir nods vaguely and makes to go back down. How funny it is to constantly receive these vague little pricks and pops of energy—like static electricity or near lightning. Like, he intuits now what he could not quite make clear before: first, that the collective fancies of all of London’s fairest would do Hickey not a whit of good, and second, that Irving knows it. By the time he settles back into his own bed, Goodsir’s fretful near unto tears. It’s much too much for one man, to bear scraps and fragments of all other men. He reads until the words blur and drift on the page, falls asleep, and blessedly does not dream. 


End file.
